The pundits are convinced that Peter Mandelson’s friendship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein is the ‘biggest British political scandal since the Profumo affair’. The latest tranche of the Epstein files, released last week, revealed the extent of the pair’s sordid association. But what’s striking to me (and I could probably do the Profumo affair as my specialist subject on Mastermind) is how both wholesome and glamorous the Profumo affair was in comparison.
The teenage girls involved in the 1960s scandal – pretty, smart Mandy and beautiful, wild Christine Keeler – were far from trafficked, unlike the lost girls preyed on by the repulsive procuress Ghislaine Maxwell for her paedophile puppet master. Both had left their homes (Mandy’s respectable, Christine’s abusive) in search of adventure of the kind only the fleshpots of London could provide. Working as showgirls in Soho, they had a whale of a time – and when the society osteopath Stephen Ward took it upon himself to become their Professor Higgins (with added orgies), they were living the dream.
If anything, Profumo ended up with a better reputation than he started with
This cast of characters had an appeal, albeit shady, that the Epstein affair woefully lacks. John Profumo met Christine Keeler at Cliveden House, when she was in the swimming pool and he was being shown around the grounds by the owner, Lord Astor. Profumo was War Secretary, which is a heavy-hitting title if ever there was one, and married to the beautiful actress Valerie Hobson; Christine would soon become his fancy piece and also bestow her favours on one Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché and spy. There is a fascinating detail about the two girls which illustrates the changing racial make-up of early 1960s Britain: Christine had a penchant for West Indian lovers, which Mandy was ridiculously sniffy about considering she herself was the teenage mistress of the awful slum landlord tyrant Peter Rachman.
It’s a very colourful and dynamic story, and one can see why it’s been catnip to creatives, fictionalised repeatedly. There was 1963’s film The Christine Keeler Story, 1989’s film Scandal!, 2013’s Stephen Ward: the Musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and the excellent The Trial of Christine Keeler in 2019, a six-part television series. (Keeler also pops up in the second season of The Crown.)
I wonder whether anyone will attempt to fictionalise the Epstein affair? If so, it won’t be soundtracked with songs by Dusty Springfield and the Pet Shop Boys. Instead, it will be a dark, dank exploration of human corruption, along the lines of the BBC’s Jimmy Savile dramatic outing, starring Steve Coogan.
The Profumo affair never really went away. Christine, still lovely despite the sometimes sorrow of her life, appeared in the video for Bryan Ferry’s 1988 single Kiss And Tell, alongside another notorious teenage blonde Mandy – Mandy Smith, the underage girlfriend of former Rolling Stones guitarist Bill Wyman. Wyman, incidentally, got clean away with his actions even though he was 47 and Smith was 13 when they met.
In 2019, an art project called Dear Christine, the culmination of four years of work by the artist Fionn Wilson, opened in Newcastle. After travelling the country, it ended up in London the following year, featuring work by twenty female artists in order to put a ‘female perspective on a narrative that has mostly been led by men’.
I was honoured to write the programme and to meet Christine’s lovely son, Seymour Platt, who said his late mother would have adored the exhibition. Platt spent ten years campaigning for a royal pardon concerning his mother’s conviction and jail sentence for perjury and told the Mirror last year:
I try not to be political but I’m bloody delighted that it’s a Labour government…I’d love Labour to look at this with fresh eyes and be humane to correct an inhumane decision.
Intriguingly, the Mirror went on to reveal that Christine had shared a prison cell with Wes Streeting’s grandmother! So yes, a story both more strangely wholesome and luridly glamorous than the ghastly events currently unwinding in front of our horrified, can’t-look-away eyes.
The biggest difference will probably turn out to be between the post-public lives of Profumo and Mandelson. The former resigned gracefully and immersed himself in charity work at Toynbee Hall in the East End, which worked ‘to bridge the gap between people of all social and financial backgrounds’. Profumo became their chief fundraiser and with his appointment by the Queen at Buckingham Palace as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1975, his return to respectability was complete. If anything, he ended up with a better reputation than he started with. It’s very hard to imagine Mandelson embracing such a life of anonymity and altruism.
But if one is of a more shallow bent, then a picture is worth a thousand words. What two images could be further apart than the radiantly beautiful and naked Christine Keeler straddling a chair – and Mandelson in his underpants, a little man stripped of his ermine and caught with his trousers down?
